The object of this invention is to provide a feasible and economic process for major mining industries to treat clay slime effluent material containing a large percentage of contaminated water to extract the latter for portable and/or industrial reuse. As currently practiced, the mining industry consumes a great quantity of water to remove phosphate rock, china clay, diamond and bauxite minerals from the earth in addition to various tarsand oil extraction processes. In these various mining processes large amounts of intractable stable clay slimes are produced containing a great quantity of water (generally about 80 to 90%), thereby forcing the mining industries to build huge lagoons to hold the aforementioned waste slimes. While most of these operations are situated in a rural setting and therefore space is not a detriment to the formation of these lagoons, the same are still becoming quite expensive as a result of their continuous maintenance and having to initially extract the earth to form the lagoons. The instant clay slimes are also an environmental problem in that fish and plant life will not readily flourish in these lagoons which usually contain rather toxic asphaltenes. A mining operation in which water is used only one time is also expensive on account of the fact that a portion of the mineral to be mined is dissolved in an aqueous solution with the clay slimes and thereby unattainable to the miner. It is therefore an object of this invention to provide an economically viable process to remove these minerals and obtain clear reconsumable water in addition to the clay.
The instant process provides a means to accomplish the above ends for the mining industry in an economical manner and provides for the additional recovery of the desired materials which gives the various mineral obtention processes greater affirmative pecuniary leverage.